The Student Association Senate passed three resolutions Tuesday night to affect academic policy and procedures, including academic forgiveness.
Day Student Senator Caroline Adams brought a resolution before the Senate to change the academic forgiveness policy of the university.
“Academic forgiveness is a really big deal here on campus, especially seeing as we have difficult classes at the freshman level all the way up to the senior level,” Adams said.
A new policy to include all letter grades in the academic forgiveness policy would better suit students. With this new policy, students can master a class they made a C or a B in, and this would provide more incentive and opportunities for students, Adams said.
“I don’t see why we’d have to specify it for D’s and F’s,” Adams added.
Many other universities offer an active and effective forgiveness policy that includes all letter grades, so it makes sense for Mississippi State to do the same, she said.
Adams also proposed two resolutions dealing with putting teacher evaluations online.
Resolution 21 passed with 36 senators voting yes and 1 voting no.
Resolution 22 proposed making teacher evaluations available online for students to fill out. Resolution 23 dealt with making the results of all teacher evaluations available online. Both resolutions would make it easier for students to fill out evaluations and research future teachers, Adams said.
“These evaluations seem really tedious,” he said. “It’d be a lot easier if we just did them online.”
College of Arts and Sciences Senator Melissa Sharp said the online evaluations might provide less input for the university.
“How many students would go and fill them out online?” she said.
Day Student Senator Hillary Cook said student participation for other events may be a sign of how they would respond to these evaluations.
“The voting has been down for Homecoming elections and Senate elections,” she said.
College of Engineering Senator William Cleveland said the current way evaluations are conducted provides inaccurate information.
“People in classes filling out evaluations are just filling them out to get out of class,” Cleveland said.
SA director of academic affairs Matt Bramuchi, whose committee was involved in drawing up the resolutions, said the committee considered schools such as Vanderbilt and Brigham Young University, schools that have already implemented online evaluations.
“The idea of incentives has been an idea that has been tossed out,” he said.
The concept is to provide an incentive, such as an earlier registration time, for students who fill out the evaluations, but the university also wants to tie it into classes, Bramuchi said.
“Somewhere between those is where we want to be,” he said.
Our systems are capable of providing evaluations online, but we could also provide these using any of a number of available softwares, Bramuchi added.
Resolution 22 passed with 35 senators voting yes and 2 voting no. Resolution 23 passed with 32 senators voting yes and 5 voting no.
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